How the BTCC produced one of motorsport's best finales

Take your pick: a rollercoaster of emotions, it can't be scripted, the stars aligned, it had to be seen to be believed, it isn't over until it's over. Regardless of whichever cliche you assign to the 2019 British Touring Car Championship season finale on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix layout, nothing comes close to encapsulating the drama that unfolded for Colin Turkington to win the title.

This was a driver who had lost his lead in the standings to Dan Cammish ahead of the final race. He was eight points shy of the Team Dynamics pilot and was staring at 24 cars in front of him on the grid after being hit by Matt Neal into a spin on the opening lap of race two. Even the WSR driver himself said that he was "out of the championship" ahead of the final contest.

And yet he is now the BTCC's joint most successful driver with Andy Rouse, having clinched his fourth series crown last weekend, and he only moved into that position with one lap of the 30th and final race of the season to go.

It's impossible not to feel desperately sorry for race one winner Cammish, whose late brake failure sent him careering backwards into a tyre wall to record his only non-finish of the year.

Equally, no one can deny that Turkington is a worthy champion.

The weekend had got off to a perfect start, as Turkington stormed to pole by 0.316 seconds over Ash Sutton in a rain-hit qualifying to score a bonus point. But the BMW 330i M Sport doesn't like mixed conditions - it's the class of the field on a fully wet or fully dry track, but suffers on a greasy surface.

In the opener, he was faced with just that. A sluggish start dropped him behind Sutton from the off, but Turkington fought off an attempt from team-mate Andrew Jordan and then retook the lead at Druids on the inside. As rain fell, however, the slick-shod BMW began to drop back behind its front-wheel-drive rivals.

"I think it's clearly a professional foul and a red card offence. If it had been a Honda in front of him I bet he wouldn't have hit it. A BMW is a much easier target" Colin Turkington

After getting stuck behind Jason Plato and sliding wide in qualifying, Cammish lined up only 12th.

But he soon bolted to seventh, bumped passed Sutton, inherited a place when Jake Hill slid wide and devoured Rory Butcher with a stunning move around the outside of Paddock Hill Bend for first place.

A second win of the season, on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix layout where he racked up his two wins last year, meant Cammish slashed Turkington's standings advantage in half to just eight points. Such was Cammish's lead, even a 5s time penalty for passing Tom Oliphant at the safety car line - the race having been paused when Matt Simpson thumped the tyres at the top of Paddock - didn't knock him from the top step.

Sutton left it late to bag his first win of the season in race two, but it was Neal who hogged the limelight. He and Cammish made laboured starts from the front row as fifth-starting Turkington hooked his car up well. He shot ahead of Neal into the first corner and then caught up with Cammish, who was slow through Druids. That allowed Neal back onto his tail.

As Turkington took a defensive line into Graham Hill Bend, he came across the front of Neal's Honda Civic Type R and was sent spinning onto the grass. TOCA put the blame on Neal, dealing out a five-place grid drop for race three and adding three points to his licence.

"I think it's clearly a professional foul and a red card offence," Turkington said. "I'm sure when he saw me up front and behind Dan he was pretty keen to reverse the situation. If it had been a Honda in front of him I bet he wouldn't have hit it. A BMW is a much easier target."

Neal, on the other hand, was far more clear cut: "If I wanted to do Colin [in] then I would have done it in the first place. My car was clearly down his inside and he just turned across me."

To add insult to calamity, it meant Team Dynamics won the teams' championship over WSR - with Oliphant, not Jordan, the other driver nominated by the team to score towards that title battle.

Turkington eventually got the car pointing in the right direction and rejoined in 28th. He was given a lifeline through the intervention of the safety car, as Jack Goff slid his Volkswagen CC and tagged the rear of Oliphant, which left an unsighted Adam Morgan with nowhere to go - T-boning the 3 Series as a result.

WSR called Turkington in to try to salvage his race by fitting the prime compound slick tyre. But it was only on the final lap that fellow dry tyre runner Jake Hill clocked the fastest lap as the conditions never came to the defending champion. He was consigned to finish 25th.

As Turkington was in strife, early leader Cammish put up little by way of a defence against Sutton into Clearways and the Subaru Levorg GT driver romped home by 5s. Jordan, meanwhile, outdragged Cammish for position down the main straight but the Honda driver fell no further down the order.

With only the final 15-lap race remaining, Cammish led the way on 318 points compared to Turkington's 310 and Jordan's 305.

Cammish is hard on the brakes, and as a left-foot stopper - unlike Turkington - the pedal travel was starting to extend as the front anchors cried mercy. The worse it got, the more he had to stamp on the controls to slow the car

In a not unsurprising turn of events for the BTCC, it all came down to the final race of the season for the title destination to be decided.

But with Cammish starting eighth on the partially reversed grid, compared to Turkington's 25th, the engravers must have been chomping at the bit to begin carving Cammish's name onto the trophy.

With rear-drive traction and no success ballast, Turkington enjoyed a strong launch but it almost didn't seem to matter. Impressive as it was, nor did it seem to matter that he climbed a staggering 10 places on the opening lap. But on the next tour he found another two spots, and then another three and soon Cammish was in his sights. He still had to overhaul the Honda driver, but at least it made for good TV.

Turkington's superior traction out of Surtees took him past Tom Ingram on the run into Hawthorns for eighth. And then, as Cammish sought to make progress past Ollie Jackson, Turkington dived up the inside into the Druids hairpin and past the Civic Type R.

Jackson then ran wide, allowing Turkington and Ingram to go by, but not Cammish. All the while, the front brakes on the Civic were a pulsating orange - notably more than any other car. But the double Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion still retained his points lead.

As the field snaked through the high-speed middle sector on lap 14 of 15 it looked as though, as valiant as Turkington's drive had been, that Cammish had done enough. But then his chances were snuffed out.

Cammish is hard on the brakes, and as a left-foot stopper - unlike Turkington - the pedal travel was starting to extend as the front anchors cried mercy. The worse it got, the more he had to stamp on the controls to slow the car.

Barry Plowman, the co-owner and technical director of Team Dynamics, reckoned running close to Jackson had exaggerated the issue with a lack of clean, cold air to cool the brakes. Either way, Cammish hit the pedal into Hawthorns with such force that the rear wheels locked and the car swapped ends. He shot backwards across the gravel and mounted the tyre wall.

Fortunately he walked away unscathed from a big hit, but the greater impact lay in the fact that he was barely 2.5 miles from becoming a BTCC champion in only his second season.

An hour after the chequered flag had been waved for Jason Plato's first win of the year and 97th in the BTCC, losing the title by two points hadn't begun to register for Cammish.

"I don't feel anything," he said. "I don't feel sad. What's just happened there? I don't think it'll dawn on me just how close I came and just what's happened. I came within one and a half laps of being the touring car champion.

"I gave it everything, I gave it my best and at the end of the day it just wasn't to be. I don't know what to say. I am heartbroken that I have lost it, but it hasn't really sunk in yet."

"It's definitely been the race of my life. During race two, when the slick tyres didn't switch on, that's when my heart sank and I thought 'That's me out'. I'd haemorrhaged so many points" Colin Turkington

For the next few weeks it will be of little consolation to Cammish, but, with Team Dynamics showing its faith by giving him a two-year contract, he has every opportunity to come back and take the crown in a much more domineering fashion.

It probably won't make all that much difference to Cammish's feelings, but his crash means he didn't even finish as the 2019 runner-up. Jordan signed off his year with a fourth-place finish, drawing level on 318 points with Cammish. But with the highest season tally of six wins, compared to Cammish's two, it meant Jordan edged ahead in the table. Remarkably, despite its 23 years in the series, it is WSR's first ever championship 1-2.

Josh Cook and Ingram retained a mathematical chance of winning the title ahead of the final round but they were little more than rank outsiders. Jordan, entering the weekend third, still faced long odds, which weren't helped when he qualified third behind his team-mate.

Alongside the calm demeanor of Turkington, it was Jordan who was keen to stoke the in-house rivalry in the pre-match build-up. But slipping to eighth in race one, with Turkington fifth, dented his chances of a revival. But then second in race two, a slot ahead of Cammish, and with Turkington skidding around on slick tyres in 25th, offered a glimmer.

Jordan was valiant and super clean in his fight up from ninth to fourth in race three, but no amount of theatrics from the other side of the WSR garage could come close to the way in which Turkington scored the ultimate spoils of glory.

He was in tears before he'd even made it to the chequered flag and was more animated than ever, shouting and fist-pumping his way around the cooldown lap.

"It's definitely been the race of my life," Turkington said. "During race two, when the slick tyres didn't switch on, that's when my heart sank and I thought 'That's me out'. I'd haemorrhaged so many points. My chin was definitely down but I was prepared to see what I could do.

"Somehow we did it. I knew lap one was going to be crucial to leapfrog my way back into the race. At the end of lap one I could see both Dan Cammish and Andrew Jordan, so I was like, 'Hey, we've got a chance here'. Whenever I got behind Matt Neal I thought, 'Oh, well this is going to be hard'. I knew I could put pressure on Dan because it was all for him to lose."

When the new BMW 330i M Sport rolled out for the pre-season test day, Turkington admitted that the partnership had got off to a rocky start and that he couldn't drive his natural style in the new saloon. And yet, from the first race at Thruxton, he had led the championship all the way through until race two at Brands Hatch thanks to five wins - and Jordan's pivotal non-score at Donington Park, when he crashed out of race one and then spent the rest of the meeting in hospital.

Turkington is not the BTCC's most exuberant character - he lets Plato and Neal fight for that honour - and yet he never seems to be able to wrap up the title in a quiet and straightforward manner. In 2009 he became a champion for the first time before being dumped from the series after WSR title sponsor RAC pulled its backing. In 2014 Plato punted his BMW 1 Series into a spin at Paddock Hill Bend in the season finale. Last season, it was another tense final race decider. But 2019, reckoned Turkington, will take the prize.

"That was the toughest one," he said. "2018 was such a tough year personally. I just wanted it to be over, I just wanted to win the championship and go home.

"I never felt that I've won the championship in style - even in 2014 I won after race one but then got taken out in race two. I've always left after race three not feeling great about myself. To have actually won the championship in style - I put that in my notebook coming into the weekend, that I was going to win it in style this weekend, and I've lived up to that. Whenever you're not expecting something and it happens, it means a lot.

"There have been some amazing finals before but for me personally I could never replicate that. You would have to try really hard to hype up another BTCC final like that. I'm just glad it's over."

After the loss of his mum during the 2018 season, and having won the title with just the sole race win, Turkington and his family marked the occasion in muted fashion - a Chinese meal on the way home from the track. But 12 months on, it's a safe bet that after such a dramatic climax, his celebration will be far more exuberant.